


Fellow Babies

by lumiere42



Series: And I Ran [4]
Category: WKRP in Cincinnati
Genre: Assault, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Gatorade is revolting, Knives, Let's not even get started on the Bee Gees, Substance Abuse, This one is rough folks, Trauma, Triggers, the Ronco Veg-o-Matic incident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 17:29:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20429744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumiere42/pseuds/lumiere42
Summary: Everyone has a story they can't talk about. Until they can.





	Fellow Babies

Usually if she's been drinking, she doesn't dream that night, but this time her mind conjures something: wandering through a maze of damp cement tunnels, everything smelling faintly like chlorine, that faraway feeling of _dissolving_ somehow that keeps both time and dread at just enough of a distance to know it's there. Taking turn after turn, only to keep entering the same damn room with its shiny blue tiles and fluffy green rug --

A deep _boom_ overhead startles her awake. She's not sure where she is for a moment, till flashes of lightning through windows let her clock her surroundings. Johnny's messy little shoebox of an apartment: her curled up on the narrow bed, him asleep sprawled in a heap of blankets on the floor, rain coming down hard like radio static outside. The relief at being shaken out of her own head is so great that she just goes limp and lets everything go black, this time mercifully dreamless.

Eventually she becomes aware again: a weird floatiness; dull, distant headache and nausea; a series of odd bumping and scraping sounds. She opens her eyes to thin gray light and starts to sit up, and a sudden wave of dizziness makes her revise that to just rolling over and propping herself up on her right elbow.

The window across the room is already open; the bumping and scraping is Johnny opening the one over the kitchen sink (with muffled swearing at how it sticks). It's still raining out, a dull roar. She groans and lies back down, with an arm over her eyes.

A series of fridge-and-cupboard-door sounds, and then something nudges her shoulder and she uncovers her face. Johnny, coat and hair badly sleep-rumpled, a mug in each hand, staring at her with half-open eyes.

"Hey," she manages. Her throat and sinuses feel like they're coated with dryer lint.

"Hey."

She sits up - slower this time - and he hands her a mug before sitting down cross-legged on the blanket heap. The drink is a strange shade of yellow and tastes horribly not-quite-lemon.

"What is this?"

"Gatorade. It's supposed to be good for your blood chemistry or something. Tastes like rhino piss, but it does help with hangovers."

"Oh." _Probably better to just get it over with then_, she thinks, and gulps down about half of it.

"Food-wise, I've got ... half a box of stale doughnuts and half a bag of stale corn chips." Johnny's clutching his mug in both hands and staring at it with a slightly dazed expression. The mug has a picture of Mickey Mouse flipping the bird on the side, she notes.

"How do you not have every vitamin deficiency in the world, with those habits?"

"I stave off scurvy by actually eating the pickled vegetables in martinis."

Her stomach turns over at that. "Please. Don't say 'martinis.' Or maybe even 'vegetable.' I ... don't think I want to think about food just yet."

"Me neither."

She puts the mug on the windowsill beside her. "Though...I'm not feeling _quite_ as bad as I thought I would."

"Well, you did sort of...offload a lot of what you had."

She winces. "Yeah. Sorry about that."

"Hey. Let he who has never overdone it and horked in an alley cast the first criticism. I sure can't." He makes a face at his mug, sets it carefully aside on the floor, and leans back on the blankets, hands behind his head -- and ordinarily she'd be finding this interesting, God knows from time to time she's imagined waking up with him, but this is _light-years_ off from that and besides --

"Bailey?"

"Yeah?" She pulls her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around her legs.

"Um...how much do you remember about what you told me last night?" And under the tiredness his voice is so quiet and kind, and some part of her wishes he'd stop or be mad at her about this whole mess or _something_ because _this_ is making something inside her want to break --

"Everything." The little waver in her own voice disgusts her. She puts her chin on her knees and stares at the paisley pattern on the blanket, all the psychedelic tadpoles.

"It was really great when he first moved in, y'know? He started college the summer I'd just gotten out of fifth grade. My parents weren't charging him rent if he'd keep an eye on me in the afternoons. They didn't like me being out alone, which was dumb when you're eleven, but - it's not like I had that many friends. He taught me how to skateboard, and how to cook on a grill without starting a fire." She has to laugh a little at that, in the way that doesn't have any humor in it. "He said I couldn't tell my parents about that stuff, they'd get mad, which they might've but maybe he was just setting up - "

A deep breath, focusing on the paisley tadpoles. The sound of rain covering everything.

"He found out I couldn't swim - not really - and Dad thought it was a great idea that he teach me, so we'd go down to the pool in the afternoons, and...the first time I thought it had to be some kind of accident, right? But - you know - not when it's happening every time. And I didn't know what to think, I'd only ever been told about creepy guys hanging around playgrounds in trenchcoats, nobody mentions your own _family - _so. Then one afternoon - "

She's suddenly shaking all over, even though it's not that cold in here.

"We came back, and I went to take a shower, and he came in and he locked the door. He had a hand behind him. And I said something like 'Hey, get out,' he came up to me and said to - to get on the floor. And I couldn't move. And it - turned out, he h-had a steak knife from the kitchen, and he - put it up against my face - " She stops. She can feel the thin cold line of metal against her right cheekbone. "So I...did what he wanted."

She doesn't even know if she wants to say the next part - she's never said it, never heard of it happening to anyone else either, and then she barely recognizes her own voice.

"He - did that a lot over the next couple months? Even after school started in fall and we weren't going swimming anymore? If my parents were gone, he'd tell me to go in there, and he always had the knife - he never held it on me again, he'd just have it and he'd put it by the sink - he - what he liked was having me lie down naked on the rug? So he could look at me, and sort of, inspect me? Say things about how I looked? Sometimes he'd - feel me up, but mostly - "

The clearest memory, sharp like glass: the fluffy green rug under her, his shape and voice beside her, staring up at the blue tiled walls and concentrating on not crying, _not crying_ dammit, waiting for this to be over -

"Sometime in October I was home sick, I had a really bad cold, and he came home from class and - he had me go in there. And that time there were towels instead? And he climbed on top of me, and - "

She can't finish that, because she can't look at that image any more, shutting the door on it now, making it go black, making it _dead air_ like they say at the station.

"It was the last time though. I got my - you know - that November, I don't know how he found out, but he never tried anything again after. Then he moved onto campus at the end of the year."

She stares out the window, at the yarn god's-eye hanging in it and the gray fuzz of rain outside, because she's _not_ going to cry, all this is embarrassing enough without that.

Johnny's voice, below her: "You want me to kill him? Or, I don't know, at least bend his spine into some new and really painful shape?"

"No. I mean, he's not worth the trouble."

"Jesus, Bailey, I'm sorry."

She's not sure what to say to that. "Maybe if I'd - I never did say no, or...fight or anything, not after that first time - "

"Okay, first of all, you were _eleven_. Second, he's got a knife, what else are you gonna do?" Now he sounds mad, and the idea that it's on her behalf is...she doesn't know what. "And _third_, can we put the blame on the scumbag, where it belongs?"

She can't figure out how to answer that, either, so she doesn't try. "I...tried to tell my dad after the last time. Not in so many words? But I said Carl was mean and he'd, well, climbed on me and I didn't like it? And Dad said I'd had a bad dream from the cold medicine." Dimly, she realizes she's picking at the cuticles on her right hand, the old nervous childhood habit. "So I just - never talked about it again."

"Would you be offended if I said your dad appears to be an all-around shithead, too?" Johnny's voice is so dryly matter-of-fact that - even considering everything - it almost makes her smile.

"No. I mean, you're not wrong." She lies back down and stares up at the slightly cobwebby ceiling. "Look, I'm...really sorry about this."

"Sorry for what?"

She manages to resist the urge to pull the blankets up over her face. "You - ask a girl out for some fun and end up with this whole...story."

"Hey. We all have our stories, all right? I mean, most people, anyhow."

"Not, like, freakish things you can't talk about for years, though."

A pause, then his voice, quieter: "Actually, that's just what I meant."

"Do you?"

"Well. Not anything as bad as what you told me. My upbringing was mostly benign neglect, I lucked out that way, but - oh, hell, Bailey, you don't wanna be hearing anything after what you were just remembering."

"'S all right. Call it quid pro quo."

"Quid what?"

"I owe you one?"

When Johnny finally answers, his voice is flat to a degree that she's only ever heard the couple of times she's seen him really stoned. "My second wife tried to murder me."

She rolls over enough to look down at him. He's staring at the ceiling, expressionless, and is it _weird_ to see him this still.

"I never actually said that before. Well, I mentioned it to Travis once, but that was the day the tornadoes happened and I doubt he registered it."

She's not sure what she'd been thinking he'd say, but this wasn't it, and she can't think of any response that isn't stupid so she just waits.

"It was when I was in Denver. A couple years after everything in L.A. went straight to hell. Pam - that was her name - really the things we had most in common were drinking a lot and smoking a lot of dope, y'know? But hey, Denver, late 70s, bring on the Rocky Mountain High. Except it turned out Pam was a cokehead too. I didn't know for sure till a while after we were married, I tried to steer her away from it, tell her, 'Hey, if you smoke the _good _stuff you'll be mellow instead,' - naive, in other words."

He closes his eyes.

"We were living in this crappy apartment. Tiny little galley kitchen, linoleum peeling up and everything. One night - we'd been drinking, and she kept disappearing into the bathroom and coming out all agitated about nothing, something rude someone said to her that day, and - I, stupidly, said I could tell she was doing lines and to knock it off.

"She started - screaming at me and she backed me into the kitchen, and then she shoved me and I was already wobbly 'cause I was kinda drunk, so I fell. And there was - we had a food processor on the counter, and she grabbed it by that stupid collapsible handle and started swinging it. The radio was playing. The Bee Gees. 'You Should Be Dancing.' And all I could think was, _I'm gonna die in this shitty kitchen, and the last thing I hear'll be the damn Bee Gees._"

Long silence, except rain and then the low whine of the heater kicking on.

"You know when something breaks your hand, your fingers going sounds just like twigs snapping? And ribs going sounds the same, but deeper. And then she hit me in the head as hard as she could. There was this - very distinct _pop_ \- and a whole lot of sparks, and black. Next thing I know I'm waking up - hours later - she was gone, she'd thrown the processor at the wall and put a big hole in the plaster. I think she thought she'd really killed me, 'cause - there was a lot of blood. You know how head wounds bleed a lot?"

She doesn't really, but she nods anyway.

"I got one of the neighbors to take me to the hospital. Told everyone I'd been in a bar fight. I doubt anyone believed me, but they didn't pry either."

"You didn't tell the cops?"

"No. There was - we had a _lot_ of dope in the apartment, I didn't want them finding that, and - I thought she might say I came after her instead. And, really, how was I supposed to explain? Especially as a guy. Tell them a five-foot-two drunken coked-up banshee tried to kill me with a Ronco Veg-o-Matic? Who'd believe that?"

"You've got a point."

He sighs and sits up, slowly. "Besides, I didn't want her to go to jail. I just wanted out. I knew someone who knew someone who had a job open at a station in Boise, so I went." He looks up at her, eyebrows raised. "Try never to drive from Denver to Boise in early winter with a concussion. It gets real trippy. Except - you ever know you're running, but at least this time maybe you're running _to_ something?"

She thinks of the ride from Chicago to Columbus, four days before the start of freshman fall semester, watching the road spool away under the bus wheels. "Yeah."

"Exactly that."

The rain isn't quite as loud now, and something about this silence is really nice, so of course she has to break it: "So, the Bee Gees, huh?"

"Yep."

"Is _that_ why you hate disco so much?"

"Well, it's more the inherent craptacularity of the entire genre, but that didn't help, no."

"I hate swimming pools. And bathing suits, steak knives - blue bathrooms. The first place I looked at to rent when I moved here was really nice, but then I saw it had a blue bathroom and I just - turned right around and kept walking right out of the building. Offended the landlady, I think."

"I've made a point of never living anywhere else where someone could box you into the kitchen." Johnny's looking at her with the most amazingly sheepish expression, and she can feel something very close to that on her own face.

"Oh, _God_, between the two of us we could probably keep some junior therapist busy for _years._"

"Nah, they'd probably just send me straight to lockup." His voice changes to some horrible pseudo-German accent: "_Zis one ees hopeless lunatic, send him to padded room straightaway! Now for ze lovely Miss Quarters, ze four sessions a week for five years should do ze trick, hm?_"

"What is that accent supposed to be?" And there's a slight twinge of being pleased that he just called her lovely, even if it's part of a joke and even considering she feels like a goblin that just crawled out of a moldy burrow.

"Early Freudian Stupor?"

She sits up and starts smoothing her hair back. She knows just what she wants to say, but she hopes she won't sound stupid, she's always afraid she sounds insincere when she tries to say things like this -

"I'm sorry your wife did that," she blurts.

"Hey. You live. But you know about that." Johnny reaches under the bed and then hands her her glasses. "You got any idea what you're gonna do till they go back home?"

"Is your phone working?"

"Why wouldn't it be?"

"I don't know, I seem to recall a certain morning DJ asking his coworkers if he could borrow money because he forgot to pay his phone bill for three months?"

"It's working fine now. Which reminds me, I owe Venus seventy bucks."

"I'm gonna call the nearest affordable hotels to the station, see if they have vacancies? And from what Dad said at dinner, they should be done with everything in town on Monday, so I can go home Tuesday at the latest." She looks at Johnny, who's drinking the rest of his Gatorade with a vaguely revolted look on his face. "Do you...think I'm being paranoid?"

"Maybe. But this guy hurt the hell out of you once, so - even if it just makes you feel better."

"I guess I better stop by my place anyway, just for a few minutes. I need some clothes and stuff."

"Want me to come with you? Just in case he _is_ hanging around. He'd be less likely to try anything if there's someone else there."

"I'd like that. Thanks." A thought occurs to her. "So, that Gatorade? If you just put the booze directly into it, would they, like, cancel each other out?"

"I've tried it. It just tastes like rhino piss mixed with floor cleaner."

"Too bad."

Johnny shrugs. "It's _still_ not the worst drink I've ever had."

And, at that, she's actually able to laugh, just a little.


End file.
